'J.Edgar'

Rating: R

When: Opens today

Where: Wide release

Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes

★

Most adult Americans can identify J. Edgar Hoover as the longtime director of the FBI who, it’s been said, had a thing for cross-dressing. The more informed could probably tell you that Hoover was, in fact, the bureau’s founding director who served 48 years under eight presidents, all the while using his agency’s resources to illegally spy on his perceived enemies and hoard their offenses in his sinister treasure-trove of secret files.

With the historical scope of a Ken Burns documentary and a character with more quirks than a comic-book villain, a J. Edgar Hoover biopic should, at the very least, be eventful and informative. But Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is neither, managing to turn the momentous American 20th century into a bore, and doing so in a historically unreliable fashion.

The film’s central flaw is built into its very structure, with Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) acting as the narrator of his own life story, which he is literally dictating to an agent from the bureau’s PR department. If you are one of the few willing to trust Hoover as narrator from the outset, the manipulative, power-hungry character traits he displays as the story jumps back and forth in time will surely dissuade you — if the distractingly heavy age makeup hasn’t already done the job.

Hoover is delivering this retrospective during the early to mid-1960s, when Martin Luther King spearheaded the Civil Rights movement and the Kennedy brothers were running the White House. Hoover isn’t happy with any of it, and he’s desperate to hold onto the power he’s spent decades amassing.

His pit stops across the decades are frustratingly selective. Eastwood spends more time reveling in the sexual trysts Hoover digs up on monumental figures like President Kennedy, King and Eleanor Roosevelt, than examining his motivations for doing so. He mostly skips over historical periods like Prohibition, World War II and McCarthyism, yet lingers far too long on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, an event worthy of its own film perhaps, but not such a big chunk of this one.

To be fair, Hoover did initially earn his crime-fighting reputation. Eastwood takes pains to show us Hoover’s early years hunting down anarchists responsible for deadly explosions around the country, but not enough to justify his lifelong paranoia toward radicals. Hoover’s greatest achievement, envisioning and creating a centralized bureau that relies on advanced forensic techniques to solve crimes, is highlighted in the film and, if you are to believe our narrator, Mr. Hoover did it all on his very own.

Once the shock of the age makeup wears off (for some, this may be never), you can detect a solid performance from DiCaprio as both the young and old Hoover. Yet, even with Eastwood’s blatant whitewashing, it’s hard to imagine DiCaprio’s portrayal of such a weaselly, petty man earning him the Oscar gold he’s so clearly aiming for.

An insightful screenwriter could help us see such a sour character’s side of things, but writer Dustin Lance Black (“Milk”) insists that we do so without giving us any subtext, nuance or emotional threads to hang onto. Instead, we get straightforward narration and expository dialogue that introduces each time-traveling vignette and dictates Hoover’s tiresome “me versus them” rationalizations for whatever unscrupulous thing he did to stop them.

The only other insights we get into the man himself are through Hoover’s two inexplicably loyal companions, his secretary Helen (Naomi Watts) and his would-be romantic partner Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, caked inside what looks like pounds of prosthetic aging makeup). Eastwood treats Helen and Clyde’s blind loyalty and mute obedience as facts that need not be justified. Perhaps this was how Hoover saw it. If so, screenwriter Black should have played looser with the facts for the sake of his audience.

What “J. Edgar” does shed light on is Hoover’s Norman Bates-like relationship with his mother (Judi Dench) and struggle with his own homosexuality. If you had only “J. Edgar” as a historical source, you might very well exit the theater thinking the man was a martyr for gay equality, forced by an intolerant society to repress his desires and true love. While he may have had to suffer these indignities, it’s Hoover’s unethical maneuverings throughout his career at the FBI, much of which resonates today, that should’ve been the take-away from his biopic.

Alison Gang is the U-T’s movie critic. Email her at alison@alisongang.com